Ten years after Kennedy kin killing conviction, no closure for Moxleys, Skakels

We realize this is not our usual Texas on the Potomac post. It’s not about politics (directly) or about Texas (directly). But Neil Vigdor, one of Hearst Newspapers’ best political reporters, has put together a piece that’s so compelling that we wanted to share it with you.

Martha Moxley

By NEIL VIGDOR and FRANK MacEACHERN
Greenwich Time/Hearst Newspapers

GREENWICH, Conn. — Mark Fuhrman won’t forget their faces.

Six men and six women peering out at the courtroom from the jury box, their eyes glued on Dorthy Moxley.

The former Los Angeles police detective, notorious for his role in the O.J. Simpson murder case, sat directly behind the indefatigable mother of murdered Greenwich teen Martha Moxley.

“I put my hand on her shoulder. I said, `Dorthy, it’s guilty,’’’ Fuhrman recalled in an interview with Greenwich Time.

“Later she said, ‘How did you know?’ I said, ‘They couldn’t look at you if it was not guilty.’’’

It was June 7, 2002, the day Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and neighbor of Moxley, was convicted in the 1975 slaying.

A confluence of power, privilege and America’s most famous and star-crossed political clan, the crime served as the basis of Fuhrman’s 1998 book “Murder in Greenwich,” in which he fingered Skakel as Moxley’s killer.

Fuhrman was a regular at the Norwalk, Conn., courthouse during the month-long trial.

Mickey Sherman represented Skakel in the case that has thus far defined the lawyer’s career.

“I’ve been doing a lot second-guessing since 13 seconds after that verdict came in,” Sherman said. “We won every battle. We won every major issue such as third-party culpability, yet we lost the war.”

Skakel, 51, is serving 20 years to life at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Conn., his most recent attempt to get his sentence reduced having been denied by a three-judge panel.

“He told me in a letter that every day he prays for the Moxleys, but he didn’t do it,” Skakel’s cousin George Skakel told Greenwich Time the day before the anniversary of the conviction.

A decade after a 12-member jury found Michael Skakel guilty of bludgeoning and stabbing Moxley to death with a 6-iron from his mother’s golf club set, the half-life of the case cannot be measured on the pages of a calendar.

The trial never ends, not for either of the two families, who, up until that fateful Halloween morning when Moxley’s body was discovered beneath a tree in her family’s backyard, lived harmoniously next door to one another in the rarefied enclave of Belle Haven. Moxley was 15.

“It just will never go away,” Moxley’s mother Dorthy Moxley, 80, said in a telephone interview from her Summit, N.J., home. “I’ve just conditioned myself to the fact for as long as I live and as long as he’s in jail.”

Skakel lived under constant suspicion for 25 years, along with his brother, Tommy, who was dating Martha Moxley at the time. The list of suspects also consisted of family tutor Ken Littleton.

Martha Moxley has been dead for 37 years, but it's been just ten years since Michael Skakel's conviction.

The murder mystery had widespread appeal, inspiring a number of high-profile newspaper articles and books such as Dominick Dunne’s “A Season in Purgatory.”

“They’re just gang-tackling to get publicity,” George Skakel said. “He didn’t have a chance.”

It was Fuhrman’s gumshoe work that contributed to Skakel’s indictment in June 2000.

“He made statements that would fit into the forensics and the crime scene that only the suspect would know,” Fuhrman said.

In a taped book proposal, Skakel admitted to masturbating at the scene of the murder on Halloween eve. Fuhrman concluded that Skakel was obsessed with Moxley and jealous of his brother, establishing a motive for prosecutors to run with once the case went to trial.

“There should never have been an arrest,” George Skakel said. “The big story about the trial is it never should have taken place. If they had a trial, it never should have been in Connecticut.”

The man who collaborated with Skakel on the proposed book that was never published still firmly believes in Skakel’s innocence.

“I have never wavered in the belief that Michael is absolutely innocent,” author Richard Hoffman said.

Hoffman, 63, currently writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston, was introduced by a client of his to Skakel.

Emerson worked as a “ghost writer” and Skakel was pitching a book about his life in 1997. The name of the project was “Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean.”

It was an amicable working relationship, as Hoffman and Skakel worked on a proposal for publishers.

“Michael was a stand-up guy and this was a great injustice that was done,” Hoffman said.

The Norwalk courthouse was transformed into a small media village, with 50 media outlets obtaining credentials for the highly anticipated prosecution of Moxley’s killer.

Not lost upon them was the Kennedy connection. Skakel’s late uncle was N.Y. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

George Skakel, 61, who lives in Greenwich and is chief executive of a consumer finance company, is convinced his cousin would have fared better without the national and international fascination with the case.

“It wasn’t necessarily that the Kennedy name per se harmed Michael, because I don’t think it did,” Skakel said. “What harmed Michael was the fact that Kennedy was a famous name and that’s what created the attention. It’s not the Kennedy-ness of it, it’s the famousness of it.”

Though the two families involved don’t agree about much, Dorthy Moxley characterized the Kennedy factor as overblown.

“Michael Skakel is not a Kennedy,” Moxley said.

State’s Attorney Jonathan Benedict presented the jury with testimony from Gregory Coleman, a classmate of Skakel’s at the Elan School in Maine, an institution for teens with addiction problems. An ex-con and drug addict who died before the trial, Coleman testified to a grand jury that Skakel confessed to killing Moxley and said he would get away with it because he was a Kennedy. The testimony was allowed to be entered into evidence, despite Coleman using heroin at the time of the probable cause hearing.

“Frankly, this is the highest profile wrongful conviction in the U.S.,” said Skakel’s older brother John Skakel, 53, who lives in Portland, Ore.

Members of Skakel’s family testified that he had gone with two brothers to his cousin’s home across town to watch the TV premiere of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” at the time of the murder.

The prosecution sought to discredit Skakel’s alibi, which they said hinged entirely on accounts from his own family members who had a vested interest in seeing him exonerated.

“There were accusations in the press that the Skakels all lied and circled the wagons to defend Michael, which isn’t true,” George Skakel said. “These people can’t decide where to go have dinner. It’s kind of a contentious family.”

While he was doing research on the unsolved murder, Fuhrman said it became quite obvious to him that the initial police investigation had major flaws.

For one, he said Skakel was never interviewed.

Neither was a lawyer that had been summoned to the family’s household by Skakel’s father, Rushton Skakel Sr.

The crime scene itself was disturbed, with the golf club shaft removed from Moxley’s neck before the site was processed, Fuhrman said.

Former Chief Thomas Keegan, then a captain of the detective bureau who was involved in the investigation, defended the department’s handling of the case.

“It was probably the most complex I was personally involved with,” Keegan said. “I take great satisfaction that it was done both legally and ethically. I am not going to second-guess the investigation. Others have certainly done that. All I can say is that we did it by the numbers.”

Keegan is retired in Murrells Inlet, S.C., and is a former state representative.

“There are all kinds of theories that were being floated,” Keegan said. “We deal in facts, not, ‘I think or I suppose.’”

The murder hit home to him because of the nature of the crime and the fact Moxley was the same age as his daughter, Maureen Keegan, who is now a state Superior Court judge in Connecticut.

“I wonder what Martha would be today if her life had not been violently taken from her. It was just awful,” he said. “What about Martha? What about her life? Would she have had a family, a career, a profession?”

Skakel’s relatives maintain that the investigation was bungled on multiple levels, however.

George Skakel resorted to posting a pair of videos on YouTube under the username FreeMichaelSkakel that were shot in 2003 and he said help prove his cousin’s innocence.

Each 15 minutes in length, the videos contain an interview between local private investigator Vito Colucci and Gitano “Tony” Bryant, the cousin of Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant and former classmate of Skakel’s.

In them, Bryant implicated two of his friends at the time, Adolph Hasbrouck and Burt Tinsley, in Moxley’s murder.

Bryant said Hasbrouck was obsessed with Moxley and bragged to his friends that he wanted to go “caveman” on her right before the murder. The interview went on with Bryant telling Colucci that he had no doubt that Tinsley baited Hasbrouck until fulfilling his violent sexual fantasy.

A message seeking comment from Tinsley was left at his home in Portland, Ore. A Bridgeport, Conn., number for Hasbrouck was out of service.

“In my heart of hearts, I know Michael did not do it,” Colucci, who worked for Skakel’s defense team, said in an interview. “The bottom line in the case, someone had to pay for it.”

Skakel’s relatives claim that a pair of hairs discovered at the crime scene and belonging to persons of black and Asian descent, like Hasbrouck and Tinsley, could help overturn the conviction now that DNA testing is available.

“If I was a betting man and we could get DNA matches, which may already exist, maybe we’d be having a different kind of interview,” George Skakel said.

During Skakel’s appeal of his conviction to the state Supreme Court, which was denied in 2010, Associate Justice Richard Palmer gave credence to the theories espoused by Skakel’s family.

“The Bryant evidence is highly relevant because it identifies Hasbrouck and Tinsley as the persons actually responsible for the victim’s murder,” Palmer wrote in the lone dissenting opinion.

Fuhrman flatly rejected the conspiracy theory, saying that noted forensic pathologist Henry Lee found no “renegade” hairs in his interpretation of the crime scene.

“They’re just putting out stuff that muddies the water,” Fuhrman said.

Lee was traveling this week and not available for comment.

Both families agree that a major turning point in the trial came during the closing arguments by Benedict, when he took snippets of Skakel’s book proposal placing him at the scene of the crime and wove it into a powerful multimedia presentation.

“I think people, just like me, wanted justice,” Dorthy Moxley said. “It was just very obvious who did it.”

To this day, Skakel’s defenders protest the way his own words were used against him, saying that he merely admitted to “jerking off” at the crime scene, but that his comments were taken out of context to make it sound like he was admitting to the murder.

“The reason Michael lost, if you want to boil it down to one thing, was the closing argument by the prosecutors,” John Skakel said.

Of the jurors Greenwich Time was able to reach, none would agree to be interviewed about the trial.

Michael Skakel never took the stand in his own defense, which Fuhrman said speaks volumes.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Fuhrman said. “He was in a tree. I don’t care if he’s having a picnic. He was there at the time of the murder.”

There is no love lost between the Skakels and Sherman, who did a brief prison stint after pleading guilty to willfully failing to pay $420,710 in federal income taxes for the years 2001 and 2002, the same time as the trial.

“I think both the prosecution and Mickey, neither one of them were interested in the truth,” John Skakel said.

Michael Skakel’s current lawyers have filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus arguing that Sherman rendered ineffective counsel.

“They never should have hired Mickey Sherman,” George Skakel said.

Sherman has no regrets.

“I totally understand the disenchantment of the family,” Sherman said. “This case is a defense attorney’s worst nightmare when you represent a truly innocent person and you lose.”

Michael Skakel spends his days painting and has developed a spiritual aside, according to his family, who visits him when they can and regularly corresponds with him by mail and telephone. He has a 13-year-old son.

“If I was in his situation, I’d be profoundly depressed,” George Skakel said. “He’s dealing with the hand he’s been dealt with.”

Every May, Dorthy Moxley visits New Britain, Conn., for the Melanie Ilene Rieger Memorial Conference, which is named after a college student who was murdered by her boyfriend in 1994.

“It’s a group of people that don’t sit around and feel sorry for themselves,” Moxley said.

Martha Moxley is buried in Putnam Cemetery next to her father, David Moxley.